Abstract: Based on structures and dependencies of the image codestreams, a scalable stream-level authentication approach was proposed to resist packet loss. To construct the authentication algorithm by hash chaining and error-correction coding, the proposed approach can realize optimizing bit-rate allocations and unequal authentication protection. Firstly, the compressed streams of the original image are analyzed to obtain hierarchical structures and coding dependencies. Secondly, in accordance with the differentiation-importance of codestreams to the reconstructed image, sub-important packet is linked to more important packets via hash chains. Finally, these hash values of decoding-independent packets and the digital signature of the whole bitstream are encoded with an error-correction coding algorithm. The proposed scheme has a very low authentication overhead because it signs on the whole image once. Experimental results show that the authenticated image of the proposed scheme has high reconstructed quality than the other three stream-level authentication schemes.